Molecular Biology and Evolution, Vol 5, 584-599, Copyright © 1988 by Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution
M Lynch
The recent discovery of hypervariable VNTR (variable number of tandem
repeat) loci has led to much excitement among population biologists
regarding the feasibility of deriving individual estimates of relatedness
in field populations by DNA fingerprinting. It is shown that unbiased
estimates of relatedness cannot be obtained at the individual level without
knowledge of the allelic distributions in both the individuals of interest
and the base population unless the proportion of shared marker alleles
between unrelated individuals is essentially zero. Since the latter is
usually on the order of 0.1-0.5 and since there are enormous practical
difficulties in obtaining the former, only an approximate estimator for the
relatedness can be given. The bias of this estimator is individual specific
and inversely related to the number of marker loci and frequencies of
marker alleles. Substantial sampling variance in estimates of relatedness
arises from variation in identity by descent within and between loci and,
with finite numbers of alleles, from variation in identity in state between
genes that are not identical by descent. In the extreme case of 25 assayed
loci, each with an effectively infinite number of alleles, the standard
error of a relatedness estimate is no less than 14%, 20%, 35%, and 53% of
the expectation for full sibs and second-, third-, and fourth-order
relationships, respectively. Attempts to ascertain relatedness by means of
DNA fingerprinting should proceed with caution.
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Estimation of relatedness by DNA fingerprinting
Department of Ecology, Ethology and Evolution, University of Illinois, Champaign 61820.
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